Been enjoying some recent threads and was hoping to ask a few q's here as I continue my quest to actually figuring this game out - played the same way for years off and on and have a perfect losing record ;-)

Are staves / wands of confuse, hold, sleep etc monsters useful and do you carry them? I tend to fully ignore as most of what they work on are easy kills, and high level monsters seem to ignore fully? Maybe I'm missing something?

How do you tell the relative power of bows? Inspect on weapons gives you a damage number (I assume an aggregate of blows + dmg per round etc). Bows I can see a +dmg number, but is there a way to tell your effective damage per round?

On character creation, I notice some people seem to roll a lot. I just generally take the first setup and go assuming all equals out in stat gain anyway? Am I giving up an edge here?

Status effects are supposedly useful in the new version. I haven't played enough of it to know, but what you describe is sort of how it worked past dlvl 15 before, but hopefully it doesn't now. Give it a shot I guess.

On bows you find out average by inspecting ammo the same way you would inspect weapons.

I recommend using point buy for stats. It makes the early game significantly easier, and gets you to important breakpoints (0% fail and such) faster.

Point buy on stats is definitely the way to go. That way you can put everything towards STR and your next most important stat (INT for mage, WIS, for priest, DEX for everything else) so as to maximize your initial mana or blows per round.

Agreed on point buy. Everyone has at least one stat that they really don't care about (WIS for INT-based casters and vice versa) and warriors have two. And the main value of CON early on is just that it reduces the amount of CON potions you have to find before you start getting useful HP bonuses; in the early game its effects are insignificant. So you definitely want to prioritize STR/DEX/casting stat, as the stats that have the greatest impact on your character's power early on.